In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.
– Gautama Buddha
My favorite cousin David passed last month and when I found this quote I thought of him.
Some family members you feel love for but do not necessarily like. Some friends you like but don’t always love, rare is when you hold both feelings in equal measure.
David was the only person in my family that I could share my esoteric life with.
His father was a thirty-third-degree-freemason, and a free-thinker but my late beloved uncle was caught in his generation and had his biases, so I preferred to chat about my ideas with David.
I was honored when David’s younger brother called and asked me to deliver David’s eulogy. I spoke about our history and his dry and wicked sense of humor and the way he made me laugh, perhaps more than any other person I have known. As you can see in the photo I can hardly contain myself. Sometimes he would mimic, and to not embarrass anyone, I’d hold up my palm begging for him to stop but when I’d see his dimples forming, I knew his mischievousness streak was in full swing.
David loved to live well. As a renaissance man, he took a keen interest in politics, had cultural and fine art interests, was an avid reader, collected Japanese antiques, rare books, albums and was a photographer.
Even on his death bed, he stated he had five minutes to live and called his brother, an attorney demanding a will. When I heard that, I laughed out loud. Not out of bad taste, but it was an example of the irony in his dry humor; you wouldn’t know if it was a joke or the truth. I do not feel sad that he is gone, quite the contrary, I’m happy for the time we did have and relieved that he did not endure the pain he was so afraid of. But then again, death occurs only to the physical body and we will see each other again.
I believe he was spared because of a generous spirit, always giving, showing appreciation and doing for others and I, fortunately, was the recipient of his bounty.
Like me, Friedrich Nietzsche did not believe in the end; ours or that of the universe. Eternal return is the idea that the universe and all existence have occurred infinite times. Time is cyclical, not linear; our lives repeat endlessly. Human beings, sub-atomic particles, the white sky, the cherry trees.
Ancient Indians, Egyptians, Pythagoreans, Stoics, even Schopenhauer in his own way, believed in some form of reincarnation. Monotheists, in an afterlife. And Antoine Lavoisier’s law of conservation of matter states: ‘nothing is created, nothing is lost, and everything changes.’
But even Lavoisier, in that same treatise, Elements of Chemistry, warned that ‘we must trust to nothing but facts.’ And the fact is that there will be a void in my visits to San Francisco without David, but when the time is right, we shall meet again.
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